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But the Lynbrook party was to disperse on the Monday; and Bessy, who hated early rising, and all the details of housekeeping, tapped at Justine's door late on Sunday night to ask her to speed the departing visitors. It was not in Bessy to resist a soothing touch in her moments of nervous reaction.
She arrived on a Saturday afternoon, and when she entered the house the sound of voices from the drawing-room, and the prevailing sense of bustle and movement amid which her own coming was evidently an unconsidered detail, showed that the normal life of Lynbrook had resumed its course.
His wife proved more firm than he had foreseen in her resolve to regain control of her income, and the talk between them ended in reciprocal concessions, Bessy consenting to let the town house for the winter and remain at Lynbrook, while Amherst agreed to restrict his improvements at Westmore to such alterations as had already been begun, and to reduce the expenditure on these as much as possible.
This unannounced, unexplained departure was nothing less than a breach of his tacit pledge the pledge not to break definitely with Lynbrook. And why had he gone to South America? She drew her aching brows together, trying to retrace a vague memory of some allusion to the cotton-growing capabilities of the region.... Yes, he had spoken of it once in talking of the world's area of cotton production.
He broke off, moving his hat more rapidly through his trembling hands. "Never mind: tell me." "Well after you all left Lynbrook I had rather a bad break-down the strain of Mrs. Amherst's case, I suppose. You remember Bramble, the Clifton grocer? Miss Bramble nursed me I daresay you remember her too. When I recovered I married her and after that things didn't go well."
He wrote her a letter of gentle expostulation, but in her answer she ignored his remonstrance; and after that silence fell between them. The only way to break this silence was to return to Lynbrook; but now that he had come back, he did not know what step to take next. Something in the atmosphere of his wife's existence seemed to paralyze his will-power.
Still, he could not forget the last bitter hours, or change his opinion as to the futility of attempting to remain at Lynbrook. He felt as strongly as ever the need of moral and mental liberation the right to begin life again on his own terms. But Justine Brent had made him see that his first step toward self-assertion had been the inconsistent one of trying to evade its results.
Though Justine's adaptability made it easy for her to fit into the Lynbrook life, Bessy knew that she stood as much outside of it as Amherst. She could never, for instance, be influenced by what Maria Ansell and the Gaineses and the Telfers thought.
But there was nothing neither word nor message; nothing but the reverberating retort of her departure in the face of his return her flight to Blanche Carbury as the final answer to his final appeal. JUSTINE was coming back to Lynbrook.
Justine's own conviction was that, as far as their final welfare was concerned, any terms were better between them than the external harmony which had prevailed during Amherst's stay at Lynbrook. The subtle emanation of her distrust may have been felt by Mrs.
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